Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Venus is coming!Venus is a WMD!Apparently, Venus might smash into Earth in 3.5 billion years.This is unacceptable.We must take the fight to Venus, at a time of our choosing. We should not wait for the smoking gun, which will be a blotto Planet Earth - Our Mother.Venus must be destroyed.

I just posted this over at PrawfsBlawg, as part of my Guest Blogging this month, about an Arizona sheriff's roundup of deadbeat dads, and staying in on Friday nights as an aspect of my own two-city commuter marriage - my own Operation Tough Love.

Wednesday, February 4, 2009

I've Guest Blogging over at PrawfsBlawg this month (there's a link to it here on Foley's Zumutung). So I will be linking here to some of those posts.My inaugural post, "Thank God We're Not Discussing the Michael-Phelps-Smoking-Dope Story" can be found here

I bet these same parents don't worry about news reports about war (wait - our government and compliant corporate media sanitize those) or if their kids play video war games, such as Call of Duty, which is very vivid and violent.

Violence and hatred and mutilation: OK.

Sex and love: Bad.

(Learning to spell: Bad.)

Our society has serious problems with violence and militarism, including violence against women (and literacy).

Friday, January 16, 2009

If there is one trope I'm sick of, and get sicker of every year as I march upright toward the ravages of aging and my inevitable death (financial tip: Bet on Your Own Death), it's when people justify their actions by saying they are doing them "for the children." We fight against street drugs and fill up our prisons "for the children." We wage war and kill lots of people "for the children."

Obama announces that this is why he ran for president in his letter to his daughters, published in hard-hitting PARADE Magazine. (Why not just leave the letter under their pillows? That seems a whole lot easier than publishing it in PARADE.)

The hidden agenda has been exposed. Obama is President "for the children." But what about the adults?

Why don't adults register in our political and self-justifying rhetoric?

Are we cut off and cast adrift at age 18? (Is that what Obama is really telling his daughters?)

Last I checked, there were more adults in this country than children. Let's do something For the Adults.

Because if you take care of the adults, the adults are in a much better position to take care of the children.

Sunday, January 4, 2009

One thing to focus on is, What Follows? When people hear "USA will disintegrate," they get, I bet, visions of the apocalypse. That there will be nothing after. Or, they can't envision the after - they only envision the meltdown/destruction. I had the sense that people thought this regarding the meltdown of Wall Street last fall and of Detroit.

But something always follows. That is life. The change that follows could be good and should not be feared reflexively. For example, the Big Bailout (and past bailouts such as the savings and loan crisis of about 20 years ago) makes it clear that our financial system doesn't really work. It's like a young adult who says he's living on his own but gets saved every few years by his parents, who come in and give him money and pay off his debts, saying, "This is the last time, Junior!" Something's not working. Time to let the scheme crumble, perhaps, and see what follows? Ditto for Detroit. If it crumbled, would smaller car companies take root and build cars that are actually good? There would be a whole lot of skilled auto industry labor around. Entrepreneurs could swoop in .... Call it creative destruction.

So what would post-USA North America look like? The Russian academic, Igor Panarin, who proposed this idea sees the USA breaking into the following countries: Atlantic America (the Northeast, broadly construed); The Texas Republic (many Southern states); The Central North American Republic; The California Republic (really the West Coast); Alaska; and Hawaii.

Note: Prof Panarin says this will come after a fractious civil war. Can we avoid that? The whole breakup will start when cash-starved states will start withholding money from the Fed, leading to their secession from the Union.

Back to my point. What would the cultures of these new republics be like? What would their Constitutions be like? It could be a time of great creativity. I think our Constitution now is showing signs of age. Scholars do not agree on which interpretive method to use to interpret it. It's hard to know what the Framers actually meant. Time for a new one before we end up in any further in a Bible situation - scholars who seem more like high priests and sages tell us that the text doesn't mean what it says, that it means something different - something that sounds suspiciously close to the priest or sage's own broader moral, cultural, and political agenda. It's clay. Which rights would survive, which would go by the wayside, and which new ones would arise in the new constitutions?

Which region would fare best? Take economics. Would Bible-belters have a stronger economy than the East or West coasts? Would teaching Creationism in schools and blocking out Evolution harm the nurturing of tomorrow's scientists, who are necessary for innovation? Would people move, self-selecting which region to live in, based on cultural values? Would any of the new republics build Berlin Walls to prevent brain drain?

Let the games begin. This might solve our culture wars. We could see, literally, which group's ideas make for a better country. Indeed, might this sort of competition and experimentation and innovation and risk-taking have been what the USA founders actually intended all along - a creativity in self-rule that a strong federal government has squelched?

Who knows? What's interesting is that in the past 10 years we've seen some fairly uncommon things:

- impeachment of a president- 9/11- US aggressive war violating international law- stolen elections- outright government spying on American citizens- an African American elected president- economic meltdown- non-impeachment of a president and cronies who have committed numerous crimes, including war crimes

This is an off the cuff list. I may add as other oddities come to mind. Anyone care to add to the list?